Fifty Israeli paratroopers, under cover of darkness, left the hospital plane and went full speed to Lake Victoria. Inflating their rubber boats, they rowed across the water to wait close to the Ugandan shore, ready to storm into Entebbe Airport. In Tel Aviv, the rescue mission had been rehearsed to perfection; when the time came, a force of C-130 Hercules transporters crossed the Red Sea, headed south, refueled at Nairobi, and then, flying just above the African treetops, swept down on Entebbe Airport.
The radar jammer worked perfectly. The airport authorities were still trying to work out what had happened when the three Hercules transporters and the hospital plane landed. Commandos raced into the building where the hostages were held. By then they were only Jews. All other nationalities had been freed by Amin, enjoying his moment of strutting the world stage. The paratroopers waiting in support were never called into action. They rowed back across the lake and returned to Nairobi. There they would be picked up by another Israeli transporter and flown home.
Within five minutes—two full minutes less than the time allowed—the hostages were free and all the terrorists were killed, along with sixteen Ugandan soldiers guarding the prisoners. The attack force lost one officer, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, the elder brother of the future prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu. He would say that his own hard line against all terrorists came as a result of the death of Yonatan. Three hostages also died.
David Kimche’s wish for a headline-making riposte to hijackers had been more than met. The rescue at Entebbe was an episode that, even more than the capture of Adolf Eichmann, came to be seen as Mossad’s calling card.
Increasingly, Kimche found himself ever more immersed in Mossad’s efforts against the PLO. This deadly struggle was fought beyond the borders of Israel, on the streets of European cities. Kimche was one of the strategists who prepared the ground for Mossad’s own assassins, the kidons. They struck in Paris, Munich, Cyprus, and Athens. For Kimche, the killings were remote; he was like the bomber pilot who does not see where the bombs fall. The deaths helped to foster within Mossad a continuing mood of invincibility: the superior information coming from its strategists meant the kidons were always one step ahead of the enemy.
One morning Kimche arrived at work to find his colleagues in a state of near shock. One of their most experienced
But there was no time to mourn. Every available hand was turned to the task of fighting fire with fire. For Kimche it was a time when “we did not expect to be shown any mercy and showed none in return.”
The relentless pressure continued to find new ways to get close to the PLO leadership and discover enough about its inner workings to assassinate its leaders. For Kimche, “cutting off the head was the only way to stop the tail wagging.” Yasser Arafat was the first head on the kidon target list.
Another and more serious threat had begun to focus Kimche’s mind: the possibility of a second full-scale Arab war, led by Egypt, against Israel. But Mossad was a lone voice within the Israeli intelligence community. Kimche’s concerns, echoed by his superiors, were flatly rejected by Aman, military intelligence. Its strategists pointed out that Egypt had just expelled its twenty thousand Soviet military advisers, which should be interpreted as a clear-cut indication that Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, was looking for a political solution in the Middle East.
Kimche remained unconvinced. From all the information crossing his desk, he grew more certain that Sadat would launch a preemptive strike—simply because Arab demands would be impossible for Israel to accept: Egypt wanted back conquered land and the creation of a Palestinian homeland within Israel. Kimche believed that even if these concessions were granted, the PLO would still continue its murderous campaign to drive Israel to its knees.
Kimche’s alarm grew when Sadat replaced his war minister with a more hawkish figure whose first act was to reinforce Egypt’s defenses along the Suez Canal. Egyptian commanders were also making regular visits to other Arab capitals to enlist support. Sadat had signed a new arms-purchasing deal with Moscow.
To Kimche the signs were all too ominous: “It was not a question of when war would come, only the day it would start.”
But the intelligence chiefs of Aman continued to downplay the warnings coming from Mossad. They told the IDF commanders that, even if war looked like starting, there would be “at least a five-day warning period,” more than enough time for Israel’s air force to repeat its great success in the Six Day War.
